said Condy, "and strike any number of car
lines on the other side."

They left the road and struck across the links, Condy smoking his
new-lighted pipe. But as they came around the edge of a long line of
eucalyptus trees near the teeing ground, a warning voice suddenly
called out:

"Fore!"

Condy and Blix looked up sharply, and there in a group not twenty feet
away, in tweeds and "knickers," in smart, short golfing skirts and
plaid cloaks, they saw young Sargeant and his sister, two other girls
whom they knew as members of the fashionable "set," and Jack Carter in
the act of swinging his driving iron.

Chapter XI

As the clock in the library of the club struck midnight, Condy laid
down his pen, shoved the closely written sheets of paper from him, and
leaned back in his chair, his fingers to his tired eyes. He was
sitting at a desk in one of the further corners of the room and shut
off by a great Japanese screen. He was in his shirt-sleeves, his hair
was tumbled, his fingers ink-stained, and his face a little pale.

Since late in the evening he had been steadily writing. Three chapters
of "In Defiance of Authority" were done, and he was now at work on the
fourth. The day after the excursion to the Presidio--that wonderful
event which seemed to Condy to mark the birthday of some new man within
him--the idea had suddenly occurred to him that Captain Jack's story of
the club of the exiles, the boom restaurant, and the filibustering
expedition was precisely the novel of adventure of which the Centennial
Company had spoken. At once he had set to work upon it, with an
enthusiasm that, with shut teeth, he declared would not be lacking in
energy. The story would have to be written out of his business hours.
That meant he would have to give up his evenings to it. But he had
done this, and for nearly a week had settled himself to his task in the
quiet corner of the club at eight o'clock, and held to it resolutely
until twelve.

The first two chapters had run off his pen with delightful ease. The
third came harder; the events and incidents of the story became
confused and contradictory; the character of Billy Isham obstinately
refused to take the prominent place which Condy had designed for him;
and with the beginning of the fourth chapter, Condy had finally come to
know the enormous difficulties, the exasperating complications, the
discouragements that begin anew with every paragraph, the obstacles
that re